When disgruntled members attack

I certainly hope that my stories about irate members won’t follow me into 2010 and end up as posts on this blog, but I think that may be wishful thinking. Remember my last story about the member who sent an email informing me about the horrible way I manage the community?

Well, I’ve got another one for you. Today, a member whose account was banned sent an email to many people in my organization indicating that I’d sent him a racist email. (You may also recall the time I was referred to as the n-word and the b-word)

Unbelievable! This person who refers to himself as a doctor posted a horrible comment and indicated that it came from me, from a yahoo account that he has determined belongs to me. He wants to know how they could tolerate that and allow me to represent the organization.

It is such a sickening paragraph filled with racist crap that I could never even think, let alone write. And as much as you probably want to read it, I cannot post it on my blog. I just can’t.

And the thing is, people know it isn’t true so I really shouldn’t worry about it much. But I have to tell you that I am so sick of this. It’s nice that people care about the community but when you care so much about being banned that you want to take down the person you deem responsible, that’s just ridiculous. It’s an online community!

Yes, I have a thick skin and I know that you take it and move on but at some point it feels like too much. This level of abuse is getting old. It’s getting old fast.

Hopefully I will emerge with a more positive post in the next few days.

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7 comments

I’ve been there. Just this weekend, a fellow and his partner at his company (who while they aren’t a member of an online community I belong to, are both members of the local Dallas social media / tech scene) have threatened to sue me because I called him out on my personal blog over a crass joke he made at the expense of a recently deceased toddler and the child’s mother.

Yeah – he jokes about the dead, and supposedly I’m in an actionable position. Right.

I have the unfortunate experiance to have had this kind of abuse too, I had a questionable member who i banned after putting up with their crap for quite a while.

I too got a bunch of F words C words and my sexuality was questioned lol, i laugh about it now because i realise how small someone must be to post something like this (it was posted on my forums).

I certaintly wouldnt worry about it, after all they wouldnt say it to ur face would they? they are just cowards. its easy to post a load of abuse. You might in fact learn something from it sounds strange i know lol.

In fact the abuse taught us a lot on how to run our website, it made us consider the distance between us and our members and indeed we do not get a close to them anymore which is of course sad. We also dont expect any of the other members to back us and if they dont we stick to our guns!

Also the mistake I made was to leave the abuse on my forums in the thought this would make people realise what kind of rubbish we have to put up with running our site, this doesnt work either btw lol !

I reported the person who abused me to their isp and they got a warning but it didnt make any differnce they still came back, now we just ignore the abuse and even try to laugh about it and just keep banning the people.

Should we have to put up with this, of course not, but unfortunatly there are very few avenues to tackle people like this at the moment.

Hey Mr. Woc: Good to see you here as always. You know that most times I am just venting. I know that this comes with the territory but I am also wondering if you get to a point where you’re pretty much done with it all. Just thinking out loud. I have tried one of your tactics as well, posting some of the emails people have sent and that was actually well-received. Thanks for your comment.